This year I have been working on Xbox Live Compute (or Thunderhead as we know it internally). This is a product that uses MongoDB as its main Database. So I have had to learn how to investigate performance and scalability issues with this document DB. It’s been very fun! Here are some of my learnings…

Last summer we had Jimmy Campbell join the Fundamentals team for a couple of months as part of his internship with Microsoft. I was assigned as his mentor and since I was working for the Azure Service Bus team I chose his project to be “Amqp for Android”. Jimmy did such a fast job that…

After the previous post on Http Batch send for Service Bus I received some emails with questions. I looked at the msdn documentation for both Service Bus and Event Hub and noted they are missing some information. Event Hub documentation does not even mention Batch Send. So here is another post about Batch Send. …

One of the easiest ways to increase throughput when using Azure Service Bus is by using the client-side batching feature in the Service Bus protocol (as you can read in our recommendations for increasing throughput). This feature reduces the number of protocol transmissions by batching many messages into one. Note that you will still have many…

Orchard is a “Content Management System” that you can use to easily host/customize your content (such as your blog for example). It is built by Microsoft and built on top of ASP.NET MVC. It is one of the Microsoft open source projects so it has a great community and many external modules you can easily…

Hi, I’m a performance engineer at Microsoft and in this blog I’ll share tips about how to troubleshoot and fix performance issues in your applications. In my spare time I do indie game programming so expect some of the samples in that area from time to time. As Donal Knuth would say: “We should forget…

Some years ago my then boss was going on vacation. Before he left he asked me to investigate how to improve the performance of a WCF service that was being developed at Microsoft. So I did due diligence and talked with the owners of the system and they mentioned that at some point in the…

Recently I had to give an internal talk on why our team uses MongoDB as its database. Relational Databases: I had experience with SQL Server of course and when I worked in Azure Service Bus I learned how cool SQL Azure can be (or Microsoft Azure SQL Database as it’s called now). It’s really a…

Some performance tips for improving your usage of MongoDB I spent the past year working with MongoDB. Since our service was used for Halo and Call of Duty we had very aggressive scale and performance targets. So as part of our stress runs we identified some scalability issues that had their root cause in our…

Someone was just asking me this question the other day so I figured that I would answer it here for people that are interested in this role inside and outside the company. I have been a performance developer at Microsoft for a little more than 4 years. During these years I have done performance…